the musings of a free-spirited young woman dedicated to giving her soul a voice

Friday, April 9, 2010

Playing with the Universe -- Step One in Freeing your Mind

As a martial artist, I have learned how to harness my body's energy to perform feats my mind thought were impossible. Stretch my leg how? For how long? Balance on one finger? Spin that fast? Move my sword where? I credit much of my ability to overcoming my mind to a very good teacher who trained us in a traditional style. For example, in my first Kumdo class, I spent one hour doing nothing but learning how to move with my practice sword. Until I could master that, I was not allowed to move on.

My teacher was a gifted man who understood that by learning to control and overcome the mind, the impossible became possible. Every class began and ended in meditation -- that was his method and it worked for me. His rationale was that if I could see myself doing an impossible feat in my mind, I could do so in real life. He was right. By working with him and with other teachers, I learned that my energy could do all sorts of things, even manifest 100 dollars in the mail by the afternoon, if I focused on it. The trick, in order to achieve this and other things, was to remove my mind's block against such an act and to believe it was already in the process of happening.

I like movies like "The Matrix" and "Star Wars" for this very reason. They show us how to stretch our minds to dare to do the impossible. Click here and here and here for a few movie bytes on the topic!

Okay, so how to do this -- I'm certainly not special when it comes to these abilities...we ALL have them! (I'll share here my personal method and you're welcome to it if it makes sense for you; however, don't be surprised if you end up adapting these techniques to what works best for you. Let your intuition guide you as you begin and stretch.) It has been my experience that the best way to begin freeing your mind is to adopt a playful attitude. Become like the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland who always did 6 impossible things before breakfast. The mind likes routine but I like to shake things up by suggesting other neural routes for activity. Here's a few ways to get started:

1. Name your Mind.

Makes you kind of want to giggle, right? Go ahead...join me...it's pretty silly! But the way I see it, if I'm going to work with an energy that likes to control and censor and naysay, it should at least have a name. It knows my name. I just want an even playing field. Martha Beck writes in Steering by Starlight that she got the idea to give her inner naysayer a name one day and spends time in the book describing the experience. I took her idea and ran with it, learning that my inner naysayer's name is Zed. Click here to read a poem I wrote about him. My point? Make it silly. Make it fun. You'll know you're on the right track when you smile or, even better, GIGGLE.

2. Change how you start.

A lot of us get jolted out of bed on a daily basis by an alarm and begin rushing around to get to wherever we need to be. Ugh. How does that feel? Better still, how's that working for you? Rush, rush, rush. Even writing the words make me cringe. Try this instead: when you wake up, instead of leaping out of bed first thing, why not allow yourself to linger in that yummy somehow always perfect bed temperature for a few minutes. Ask yourself if you remember any bits of your dreams. If so, write them down immediately before getting out of bed. (I'll return to the topic of dreams in Part II). There could be clues there. Consider it a cosmic game of fetch, except this time, you're the retriever. Now, allow yourself to visualize how you want your day to go from start to finish. My feeling is this: why should you let other forces or personalities carve out your day for you? Be you own day's creator and have fun with it! Lay out your day and pepper it with spontaneous fun. For example, sometimes I'll build in an out-of-the-blue giggle fest or will build in seeing a pink car on the way to work or other random things. Why not?! Dr. Joe Dispenza--featured in "What the Bleep Do We Know?"--is a great example of how to go about creating your day. Here is his method:

3. Change how you see.

How do you know that what you see at any given moment is really what you're seeing? Kind of blows your feathers off to consider it, huh? Here's another whopper: what if this universe of ours had a sense of humor and wanted a playmate? Would you play? If you're up for a little adventure and want to start shaking your inner naysayer who booms that things aren't possible and magic really doesn't exist, try this strategy.

Adopt an open attitude and decide you're going to play. Give your inner naysayer the day off. Open yourself up to wild possibilities. You could take a walk. You could walk down your street. Walk around in a mall. Hop into a bookstore. Take a drive. Hop on a bus. Doesn't matter what you do...just adopt the right attitude.

Then, ask the universe a question and see what you get. What shows up on the next billboard? What does the next personalized license plate say? How about that guy's Tshirt? Does the symbol or quote or logo mean anything? Go into a bookstore. Head towards whatever section is calling you. Choose a book. Randomly open a page. Does its contents give you your answer?

Here's how I play. When I hop in the car for a long trip, I don't tune myself out. Instead, I ask the universe a question like "What country will I next visit?" And then I wait to see what the next personalized license plate says. Alternatively, I may pose a question and see what happens when I turn on the radio. About 99% of the time, the song's title, band name or lyrics give me subtle (or not so subtle) guidance for how to solve my problem/answer my question.

Or, if you like to just chill out at home, find a deck of cards and practice visualizing the color of the next card before you turn it over. As you advance in skill, you can move from colors to suits to numbers and then to combining all of them!

Practice these techniques for a bit and be open to the adventure! Don't be discouraged if things don't happen straight away or even consistently for a while. Just keep showing up. Eventually, your energy will line up to the right frequency and things will begin to happen.And the point here is really just to present the mind with events that it is not expecting so that it may learn to expect them. I'll say more about that in Part II.

One Thing: Be Brave

About Me

I feel very much rooted in the earth, but my friends and family describe my personality as "free spirited." It is good to be free spirited and wholly alive, methinks, swimming in the flow until fingers get pruney and one's soul feels saturated and content. Life is a mystery to be cherished and traveled. I like to eat good food. Soak up Nature's beauty. Laugh in the company of good people. Drum at pickup music sessions. Feel lamb's ear and pine and lavender and sage between my fingers. Count the stars in the sky and watch satellites whiz by in their orbits. I like listening to the old ones and absorbing their stories that always manage to sound fresh. I feel honored when the Muse sits and visits and the dreams that dance me into other realms at night. The synchronicities that lead my way each day, always making me feel like Alice. And the quiet that can be heard in the desert and on the shore and in the trees.

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Quotes To Live By In 2012

“Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow if polluted; we manage that. The river does not dry up; we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.” ~Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves

I can tell you that it takes great strength to surrender. You have to know that you are not going to collapse. Instead, you are going to open to a power that you don't even know, and it is going to come to meet you. In the process of healing, this is one of the huge things that I have discovered. People recognized the energy coming to meet them. When they opened to another energy, a love, a divine love, came through to meet them. That is what is known as grace. We all sing about amazing grace. It is a gift.

I think that it comes through the work that we do. For some people, it can come out of the blue, but I know that in my own situation, the grace came through incredible vigilance.